"I prefer a pleasant vice to an annoying virtue"
About this Quote
A pleasant vice beats an annoying virtue because Moliere understood that morality is often a social performance, not a spiritual achievement. The line isn’t a manifesto for corruption so much as a scalpel aimed at sanctimony: the kind of goodness that arrives loudly, corrects everyone at dinner, and mistakes irritation for integrity. In Moliere’s world, virtue can be a form of aggression - a way to dominate a room while claiming moral high ground.
The wit works by flipping the expected hierarchy. “Vice” is supposed to be corrosive, “virtue” redeeming; Moliere swaps their felt effects. “Pleasant” and “annoying” are social adjectives, not ethical ones, which is the point: society often judges character by comfort. A charming rake can glide through a salon on charisma, while the pious scold becomes unbearable precisely because they insist on being right. The subtext is bleakly comic: people don’t always choose the good; they choose what’s easy to live with.
Context matters. Moliere wrote under the gaze of court culture and religious authorities, where reputation was currency and “virtue” could be weaponized into censorship. His comedies repeatedly expose hypocrisy - Tartuffe being the famous example - showing how public righteousness can conceal private appetite. This line defends pleasure less than it deflates moral bullying. It’s a warning about the politics of purity: when virtue becomes performative, it stops being virtuous and starts being obnoxious.
The wit works by flipping the expected hierarchy. “Vice” is supposed to be corrosive, “virtue” redeeming; Moliere swaps their felt effects. “Pleasant” and “annoying” are social adjectives, not ethical ones, which is the point: society often judges character by comfort. A charming rake can glide through a salon on charisma, while the pious scold becomes unbearable precisely because they insist on being right. The subtext is bleakly comic: people don’t always choose the good; they choose what’s easy to live with.
Context matters. Moliere wrote under the gaze of court culture and religious authorities, where reputation was currency and “virtue” could be weaponized into censorship. His comedies repeatedly expose hypocrisy - Tartuffe being the famous example - showing how public righteousness can conceal private appetite. This line defends pleasure less than it deflates moral bullying. It’s a warning about the politics of purity: when virtue becomes performative, it stops being virtuous and starts being obnoxious.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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